Tag Archives: Business Plan Pro

I was amused to check in with Quora this morning and find somebody had asked me to answer “How Did Tim Berry Grow Palo Alto Software?” Obviously that’s a question dear to my heart. So here’s what I answered, which seems fitting for this blog today.

The first Business Plan Toolkit in 1988

Slowly, carefully, bolstered by good product and reviews that validated, doing a lot of coding and documentation myself, and not spending money we didn’t have.

It started as spreadsheet templates. The first of those was published in 1984 to accompany a book “How to Develop Your Business Plan,” published by Oasis Press. In 1988 I separated from that book, and redid the templates to accompany my own book when I published “Business Plan Toolkit,” released in MacWorld January 1988. All of these early products were 100% my work, my spreadsheet macros and my documentation. It helped to have a diverse background, including 10 years as a professional journalist, foreign correspondent in Mexico City, plus a Stanford MBA. I could write about business so (people told me) others could understand.

Throughout the early years I kept up a healthy consulting practice doing business plans for some startups and some larger high tech companies, plus workshops on business planning for dealers of high tech companies. Apple was by far my best client, with repeat business in consulting on business planning from the beginning until 1994 (Hector Saldana was a steady client for years, and a supporter of the business idea, and informal advisor). The consulting supported marketing expenses. There was no Internet to speak of until 1995, so the early marketing was a combination of small ads in the back of magazines and product reviews in major computer magazines.

It was a major struggle for years. I was sacrificing consulting revenues to prop up products. The motivator, for years, was “I want to sell boxes, not hours.”

My wife’s role was especially important during those long hard years. She didn’t give up on me. We have five kids and we depended financially on my consulting, but she stick with my idea of “boxes not hours” as I continued to use scarce funds to keep the product dream alive. We had some money to deal with because my role in Borland International paid off in 1986, but we were still struggling, with small houses and used cars. And by the way we’re still married as I write this in 2016.

When we moved it from Palo Alto to Eugene OR in 1992, I had three early equity shareholders (1% each) who agreed to surrender their shares because there was no value in them. My wife and I moved to Oregon because we wanted to. She said to me: “we put up with all the downside of you having your own business; let’s get the upside and move to where we want to live.”

By 1994 I was in deep trouble, with a quarter of a million dollars of unsold product stuck in retail, coming back from channels. The template products never made it. And in the words of Kathy Colder, a key purchasing executive from Fry’s, “Tim, your boxes suck.” At the worst point, we had three mortgages and 65K$ credit card debt.

Business Plan Pro circa 2000

What I did then was decide not to just repackage, but to build stand-alone product instead, dumping templates entirely. I found a local three-person programming company (Cascade Technologies, which no longer exists; its founder was Ken Barley) to take my templates and my vision and create stand-alone product for Windows using Visual Basic and an Excel-compatible spreadsheet we were able to buy as a tool, and include in the software. It added a complete interface to include the words as well as the numbers, and keep it all, even formatting and printing, inside the one application. I wrote about a third of the code myself, in Visual Basic. My vendor got a low monthly fee for 12 months, plus a percent of future revenue. We were still not able to spend money we didn’t have.

That effort was launched in 1995 and became successful as Business Plan Pro so I was able to stop consulting and dedicate myself to the business. My son Paul Berry joined me in 1998 and developed the web business with downloadable software. We grew quickly to more than $5 million annual revenues by 2000. (Paul left in 2001 and became CTO of Huffington Post in 2007 and founded RebelMouse in 2012).

In 1999 we took on a minority investment from Palo Alto venture capital, RB Webber and Associates. That was our first outside investment. In 2002 we negotiated a buyback with them because after the dot-com crash valuations had plummeted and the company was worth more to me and my family members than what an acquirer would pay for it.

I stepped aside in 2007 and asked Sabrina Parsons to become CEO while I focused on blogging, writing books, speaking, and teaching. She and the team released LivePlan in 2012 and that – a web app, SaaS, browser based has become very successful, having had several hundred thousand paid accounts already. I’m still chairman, and founder, but Sabrina and her team get a pretty free rein to run the company. Market share and awareness keeps growing and we’ve had several years of double-digit growth in revenues again, after the great recession. And it is entirely family owned.

You can see the request here on the right, posted to me on Twitter. I decided it’s a good subject for a blog post here, and I went on my own first as a service business and survived that way for 12 years before Palo Alto Software finally established itself as a product company. So I do have some tips I can share.

Set your goals right and define success well. Service businesses generally take less start-up capital but are also much less likely than product businesses to offer eventual leverage and scalability. There are exceptions, but in most service businesses the assets walk out the door every night. Those businesses are relatively easy to start, relatively easy to survive and prosper with, but also hard to grow beyond small, hard to sell, and hard to attract outside investors.

Look for a business anchor. That’s a former employer and/or a strong client. For example, I had Apple Computer, a former client, and Creative Strategies, a former employer, both willing to contract my services from the beginning. Apple remained critical to – and loyal to – my business services from the beginning in 1984 until Business Plan Pro changed the business to product-driven in 1994.

Understand your first client is twice as hard to get as your second. And the second is a third harder than the third. Land those first few clients well. Make sure they’re happy. Give them a huge discount to get the relationship going, and expect to keep your rates low for them, but ask them, in return, to not tell strangers what they pay you. Work free if you have to. You need references and testimonials.

Find a focus. Be different from anybody offering similar services to similar clients, in a way they can understand immediately and will share with others. Example: I was a business plan consultant who had a fancy MBA degree, no big deal; but I had also built my first computer, programmed extensively, lived in Latin America, and spoke fluent Spanish. My clients tended to be high-tech companies doing international business.

Use social media and blogging and your website as your main tools for marketing. Create and share content that validates your expertise. Your marketing today is so much easier than it was when I went out on my own; where I had to get through editors and publishers and conference organizers to get my expertise in front of clients (specifically, I wrote magazine articles, and books, and I spoke at COMDEX and the like), you can do it yourself by posting on blogs and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. And, soon, RebelMouse. Oh, and that reminds me: Read Duct Tape Marketing, by John Jantsch.

Spend wisely on your logo and look and feel. Look into 99Designs, I’ve seen some sensational work from them. A professional look to your logo and website (or Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn profile, if that’s all you do for a website) is really important. It isn’t a matter of business cards or stationery anymore, but it is how you represent yourself.

Don’t ever spend money you don’t have. You’ll get lots of suggestions for ways you can spend money now to make money later; mail lists, marketing programs, they never stop.

Don’t ever lose a client. Repeat business is vital. Keeping your existing clients is way cheaper and easier than finding new ones. Always go that extra mile, when you have to, to keep your existing clients happy.

Know your numbers. If you don’t know the difference between sales and money in the bank, between profits and cash, learn it. It’s vital. Know your numbers like the back of your hand.

Never compromise integrity. You’re going to succeed or fail based on your reputation. Don’t cut corners with credibility.

(Bonus point) Expect to make mistakes. If you can’t acknowledge and learn from and apologize for your mistakes, then you’re doomed. You will make them. If you think you won’t, keep your day job.

(Second bonus point) Do your own simple, practical business plan. Do it for yourself, not outsiders. Make it just big enough. Keep it fluid and flexible and review it often and revise it frequently. Read The Plan-as-you-go Business Plan, by me. Sign up for www.liveplan.com. [Disclosure: I’m the author of that book (but I’m linking you to where you can read it free) and I own Palo Alto Software, which publishes liveplan, a web app for business planning.]

Here’s a challenge: Donna Maria of INDIEBusiness asked: what’s a fun way to say business planning? That’s the tweet you see here, which I saw a few minutes ago as I sat down looking at the Willamette River drinking my coffee and starting my day.

I think I know exactly what she means. Business planning should be vibrant, creative, flexible, rapidly changing, as fun as writing a story and then figuring the steps to make that story come true. But when you say “business plan” way too many people shudder, thinking of a long boring task leading to a long useless document. Dry and boring, like she says.

But then think of some time in your life when you were dreaming about something you wanted to make happen. “Gee, maybe we could … ” is a fun way to think. “And what about if we …” That’s brainstorming, problem solving, inventing new things. “And then we could …” And it’s strategy as focus, finding your identity, building a new life, controlling your destiny.

There are many different meanings for the phrase “business plan.” That’s too bad, because a lot of people think of that dry boring thing and miss the fun thing.

I answered her tweet with one of my own, keying on the idea of dreaming, but Donna Maria has a deeper point: the phrase is worn out. We need a new one. What’s a better way to say “business planning” that doesn’t sound like the dumb old fashioned business plan?

So let’s call it a contest, and give it a prize: I’ve got a free copy of Business Plan Pro Premier edition, or a year of www.liveplan.com, or a year of emailcenterpro use (your choice) for anybody who can come up with a fun way to say “business planning.” I mean a new, interesting, better phrase. I titled my last book The Plan As You Go Business Plan, but honestly, I want something better than that. One, two or three words.

If you’re a regular reader you know I don’t normally do sales pitches here on this blog, but this is special. Last week Palo Alto Software introduced a brand new version of Business Plan Pro incorporating (finally) my Plan-as-You-Go Business Planning ideas into the mainstream of the software.

With this new version, when you start a new plan, Plan as You Go is the first choice for setting up a simple, practical, management-oriented business plan. Not the whole big formal document plan, but just what you need to run a business with. That’s the key screen above (with my annotations in red):

Now the new built-in option is exactly what I suggested in the book: a streamlined, practical outline, shown here on the right. Of course you can add more later and eventually make a larger business plan, but you do that as the business plan events happen, not before. So you add the embellishment, like description of management team, or exit strategy, only when you need it. Which is great, because a lot of people really don’t need it.

I wrote the book in 2008, but because we’ve been busy with liveplan, the new online web business planning, our mainstream software had to wait. So now I’m celebrating that it’s finally here.

We’ve also added a lot of video at many different points, so that – if you’re online – you get me talking about what you’re looking at, in very short snippets. That’s hard for me to watch, frankly, because I’m as self-conscious as anybody else … but as an author, I love the opportunity to talk to you while you’re working with what I wrote.

This is the 12th version of Business Plan Pro since the first one was published late in 1994, and actually hit the shelves in 1995. We’ve come a long way since the first one – it’s still my business planning advice, but I wrote a third of the code in the original, and now there’s a team of a dozen programmers – which makes it way better.

And, by the way, if you prefer an online version, or you’re a Mac user, there’s also a lot of my methodology and my instructions in the new online planning web app at www.liveplan.com.

For more information click here for the website or call them toll-free at 1 (800) 229-7526.

Should an early stage company bombard every online submission under the sun ? It has always been my advice to clients to tell them that it was a complete waste of time, and if I may be honest here; I was fairly surprised to see that you thought differently.

Anthony, I completely agree with what you’ve been telling your clients. An early stage company should definitely not bombard every online submission under the sun. That is, exactly as you suggest, a complete waste of time.

(Aside: misunderstandings are always the writer’s fault, never the reader’s.)

My reference to submissions was very specific. We use angelsoft.net, which is free to entrepreneurs and angel investors, and is used by about 400 other angel investors.

We would never consider investing in a company without getting to know the people personally. Our review process first narrows them down to about a dozen or so, using mainly the executive summaries. From there we break into teams, visit their offices, talk to their customers, and study their business plans (the buzzword is due diligence) before we make our decision.

I like angelsoft.net because it’s practical, it works, it collects and manages the information, and it’s free for both sides of the table. And several hundred angel groups use it like we do. It’s free for entrepreneurs and angel investors.

But submitting to us through angelsoft.net is not just submitting online. While it may be possible to use it to submit to lots of groups, that won’t work. Almost every group that uses it has its specific criteria. For example, our group looks only at Oregon companies. We’ve made a couple of exceptions for companies in Southern Washington wanting to move, but neither of them won.

Angelsoft.net does allow what it calls “bulk” submissions, meaning subsmissions to multiple groups. We don’t look at them unless they’re in Oregon. I doubt that other groups look at submissions outside their criteria either.

I’ve been watching online business plan posting sites since I finished the first Business Plan Pro in 1995. My company owns one of them, secureplan.com, but only as a convenience to our software users. It lets them post a plan online instead of printing it. Investors don’t browse it; they need an owner’s specific login information for each plan they see. And we don’t charge for it.

Those sites that charge you money to get listed where investors will find you? Assume that’s a complete waste of time and money. No, I don’t know them all. Things do change. In 15 years I’ve heard of one single deal that started with an online listing. I’ve heard serious investors have concerns about deal flow, but that doesn’t mean they’re browsing business plan posting sites.

If you’re serious about getting investment, do it right. Choose your targets very carefully. Look for close matches between what you have and what they want. Shotgun scattering will never work.

I’m well into my business plan marathon again this year, in Houston today looking forward to judging the Rice Business Plan Competition, one of my favorites.

Regarding business plans, instead of just complaining (again) about unrealistically high profitability projections, today I have some specific suggestions. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with the six excellent plans I’ve read for my part of the judging today.

But, as my mother used to say: “if the shoe fits, wear it.”

The underlying problem is that projecting high profits doesn’t usually mean you have a great business plan. It almost always means that you’ve underestimated expenses or direct costs. It’s usually a bad thing, rarely a good thing.

So here are those concrete suggestions:

Compare your projected profitability (net profits or pretax profits as percent of sales) to standard industry profiles. The most well-known source in the Annual Statement Studies published by Risk Management Associates (RMA). These will give you standard profitability rates for more than 700 common types of business. I searched the site for information business, narrowed it down to software publishing, and I was offered a download for $120. Oxxford Information Systems competes with RMA with more profiles for more different types of business. And Business Plan Pro bundles the Oxxford Information profiles with a searchable database linked to the ratios table [disclosure: I’m the conceptual author of Business Plan Pro and my company publishes it.] And there are other competitors in that market. Standard profitability isn’t that hard to find.That doesn’t mean that I recommend your projected profits always match some standard industry profile. Not at all. What it does mean, though, is that you should know what profits are reasonable for similar industries, and don’t project huge profitability that’s 5 or 10 times higher, in percent of sales terms, than the standards. That kills credibility.

Compare your projected profitability to results of publicly traded companies in your industry. You don’t need an exact match, but you should know how different your projections are, and you should satisfy yourself on why they’re different. The publicly traded companies tend to be larger and more established than new startups. Sometimes a startup is so new and innovative that it is much more profitable than industry leaders; but that’s rare. If you don’t know where to find financial reports of publicly traded companies, start with Yahoo Finance.

Do a good web search to see if you can find comments on blogs or in interviews where entrepreneurs talk about actual profits in real businesses like yours. Maybe you’ll find somebody who might be a competitor. People give a lot of information away these days, in blogs, and on the web.

Try to find somebody with actual experience in a similar company. Use social media, use your mentors, talk to the nearest business school or chamber of commerce. Get somebody to tell you, from real-world experience, what kind of profits are likely.

If all else fails, remember that across the real world of business, normal profits run about 5, 10, maybe 15 percent of sales. If you’ve done your best and it still shows 30 percent or more, take a good look at your payroll, headcount, and marketing expenses. When it doubt, add marketing expenses to take your projected profits down to a credible level.

Is this you? Does your business plan project profits way above standard levels? That doesn’t make your plan look better. First, make it credible. Only then are the numbers really interesting.

[Disclosure and bias alert: I’m conceptual author of Business Plan Pro and founder of the company that publishes it. If you read this blog regularly you know that I almost never post about my company’s products; but this post is special because it’s a point that needs to be made.]

My post here Friday about coaches and consultants reminded me of a pet peeve. I think it’s a shame that any business plan writer/ coach/ consultant ever works with a client without using business plan software as a shared tool that optimizes the work and the relationship. And I don’t mean dumb templates, or fill-in-the-blanks rehash, but good software.

(For brevity, let’s just call that writer/coach/consultant the expert.)

The wrong way: client gets an idea and works on it in the middle of the night. He or she sends an email to the expert summarizing the thought. Now the expert has to incorporate that thought into a revision.

The right way: instead of writing an email, client opens up the latest version in the software, renames it to a new version, revises it, and send an email attaching the latest as a file, asking the expert to comment.

Consider how many wins come from the right way:

The expert, whose hours are presumably expensive, isn’t billing for redundant tasks that don’t optimize the expertise. Billing is based on expertise only, so the amounts are less, the expertise is easier to buy, the expert sells what he or she is good at, and the client can afford a longer term relationship.

The client owns the business plan. He or she never has to turn to the expert to answer questions about the plan.

The business plan lives in the client’s space, where, whether or not the relationship with the expert continues, the client can get it, review it, revise it, and keep it alive as planning, not just a plan. Planning is management, and steering the company. A plan is just a document. Regular reviews and revisions turn a plan into the first step of planning.

Then ask yourself why any business plan expert does it the wrong way. With apologies in advance for showing a bit of contention here, here are some possibilities: What do you think?

The client is too stupid to manage his or her own plan?

The expert wants to control the relationship by building a dependence so the client can’t ever manage the ongoing plan without paying the expert?

The expert wants to operate like the Wizard of Oz, with smoke and mirrors, so the client doesn’t realize what he or she is really getting?

The expert has so little faith in his or her expertise that he or she is afraid that once the clients sees the software, the expert will become an unattractive option?

For the record, I was that expert for many years, and I practiced then what I now preach here. My first business plan engagement, which I’ve blogged about as my worst-ever business plan engagement, was the only one I did all by myself in a way that left the clients not fully realizing that it was their plan, not mine. I didn’t duplicate that mistake. Right after that, I developed spreadsheet templates that became eventually Business Plan Pro, so that my clients could share the tool, the work, and the thinking. I billed more than seven figures for business planning over a period of 11 years, without ever having a client not using the same software I was.

May I call it the expert business? It’s kind of like a zoo (no offense intended). There are coaches of all varieties, from business to life to style, to executive and leadership and others. And management consultants, planning consultants, strategy consultants, marketing consultants, public relations consultants, etc. And designers and programmers, project managers, event planners, graphic artists … I’ve been both seller and buyer, and I’m thinking I can help you figure out which section to go to, and which cage to rattle, by sorting through some of the species, and some of the differences.

I worry that people use these terms indiscriminately. To me, a coach teaches you to do it better, helps you, and trains you to do things better. A consultant delivers a report telling you what you’re supposed to do.

A coach watches you do it, then reviews your performance. A consultant studies, listens, concludes, and delivers the conclusions.

Can you tell I lean towards coaching? Maybe because I made a living consulting for 20 years, both on my own and as an employee of brand-name firms. And in my specialty, business planning, having it done for you doesn’t work. It’s like paying somebody to do your exercise. Coaching is more likely to work better. I’ve done strategy consulting, and that’s very similar. Strategies are to develop and implement yourself, over a long term. A coach might help, a consultant, not so likely. I’m immersed in social media, and I think that’s another example of something you so yourself, ideally, rather than have done for you; which means it’s another area for coaching more than consulting. And PR? Maybe you have somebody do the press releases, and arrange the meetings, and suggest tips and techniques, but do you believe in anything actually said by a spokesperson?

Ideally, you look for a relationship in which you are buying, and paying for, just the expertise. Pay the expert to coach you as you do it yourself. You pay for fewer hours, but you still get the benefit of somebody else’s experience and expertise. That’s the best of both worlds.

(Note: as the conceptual author of Business Plan Pro software, I’m completely biased on this point, but I’m amazed that any business plan coaching or consulting relationship doesn’t include two copies of business plan software, one for coach and one for client. That empowers the client, who has to own the plan to implement it, and focuses the consulting work on coaching, not doing. Both sides win.)

It’s about time that business writers, assorted experts, entrepreneurs, academic and the rest start focusing on the huge damaging and wasteful misunderstanding that most of us have contributed to: that completely out-of-date idea that a business plan is a document, done once, related to raising money.

So I’m delighted to see Seth Godin jumping onto this issue with a good restatement of the problem and an infusion of new ideas to shake us up. His modern business plan post on his blog Monday starts with a quick but very real problem:

It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore and show an ability to comply with expectations.

The most important word there is “misused.” Because that’s the myth of the business plan. Case in point: last week a journalist asked me if we had “an official business plan” for Palo Alto Software. That was his phrase, not mine: “official.” As in formal. Static. Left somewhere in the drawer.

Somebody on Twitter asked me what I thought of Seth’s post, thinking, I’m only guessing, that I’m in favor of the more traditional business plan. No way. I love the new thinking. It’s right in line with what I’ve been posting for several years now.

There’s no such thing as an official business plan, but the idea highlights the misuse. People spending months developing documents instead of businesses. That’s waste.

It should be business planning, a process, reviewed and revised regularly, a tool for managing and steering a real business.

Seth’s recommendation is excellent. Let’s shake the old expectations up, change the expectations, change the arrangement… and what he recommends doesn’t do anything but enhance the real business purpose of business planning.

His recommendation? A new standard order of plan documents:

I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections:

* Truth
* Assertions
* Alternatives
* People
* Money

He goes on, in the post, to talk about each of those sections. Excellent suggestions. His new order would make a great business plan.

From my point of view, this suggested reordering is nothing but positive. The business plan is just step one of planning; it’s about managing change. It’s not a sales brochure. It’s not a pitch to investors. It’s not even a plan; it’s planning. It’s about managing change. It’s about optimizing, prioritizing, setting long-term goals and short-term steps, with metrics and tracking. Why not put it in this order?

If nothing else, at least it shakes up that mythological business plan that so many people are tempted to misunderstand and misuse. And there’s no downside to it.

Read his post. See what you think. And if you read my stuff on business planning, I think you’ll find I’ve always been in favor of flexible one-of-a-kind business plans, as part of planning process. It fits perfectly with my work on business planning, including the two highlights of my recent work: Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan and Business Plan Pro.

In the retail business you have some companies who live on copying packaging. They put imitation products inside imitation packages to fool people, so they get the wrong thing. I hate that. How do they live with themselves?

But it’s not illegal.

And it’s also the history of innovation. From VisiCalc to SuperCalc to Lotus 1-2-3 to Quattro Pro to Microsoft Excel, copying makes things better. From CP/M to DOS to Windows, copying makes things better. The original Macintosh operating system borrowed from an earlier mouse and window system developed by Xerox. The iPod was not the first MP3 player, nor is the iPad the first tablet computer. These were not new ideas, but they were improvements.

And all the cool new phones now are copying the iPhone.

Do we hate the people who copy ideas? We all do it. Kids learn their moves in sports by copying other kids. We learn to write better by copying writing we like. We learn to get along with people by copying people.

The entire history of human creativity is built on copying. What, if not copying, is the cause of those identifiable periods in music and art and writing, like the Baroque or Renaissance? What except copying makes Gothic cathedrals? Try to name a good movie that didn’t borrow from some earlier movie. Even Shakespeare was often redoing older classical themes.

And yet, when I look at all the stuff in the market that’s copying something else, it makes me mad. Do your own thing. Be original. Make it better. Don’t just copy my thing. Even if it’s barely legal, it’s still sleazy.

A lot of great art starts with copying, borrowing themes, ideas, and so on. But business, starting with one idea and adding to it, making it better, creating new things based on old things, that’s progress. Business copying, looking like somebody else just to steal some respect, is just bad business.

I’m glad cool new innovations based on existing stuff succeed. I hope all sleazy business copies fail.